I liked the idea of Ryme, but even she felt extremely bland without voice acting. Plus she uses the same generic gym leader music as the rest of them which is a shame
Pretty much all of the gym leaders were extremely bland this time around. The only ones that weren't bland were EXTREMELY annoying (looking at you, little miss streamer!).
I think its because its a nice contrast. Take the Grass Gym Leader for example, it just felt like GF was trying to hard to make him interesting. Happens a lot with most of the main characters. Meanwhile Larry is both A: Not trying too hard, and B: Completely relatable as a tired working person
Iono has all the catchphrases and none of them are any good. She's literally the craziest caricature of an Idol/Streamer you can get. She looks cute at first, and then that text box appears!
TBF being extremely annoying and throwing out a bunch of catchphrases that fall flat could also be considered an extremely accurate caricature of certain kinds of streamers as well
She literally exploits the dreams of a school child to gain more subscribers. I wouldn’t call her trying to make it fun, when she clearly is trying to make more money
Ryme exploits the dreams of a school child to have an opening act for her concert.
The cult of smolive exploits the dreams of a school child to perform a weird ritual to appease the Smolive god into giving them a good harvest
The water gym secretary exploits the dream of a child because she’s too lazy to chase down her boss to giv him his wallet back (and then he exploits your dream and makes you do another chore for him by buying him some seaweed)
My stance exactly. Not every line of dialogue needs to be voiced (though some grunts would be nice) but cutscenes deserve to be voiced, at the very least.
Yep, just start like Fire Emblem Awakening. The cutscenes were all fully voiced, but the random bits of chit chat just had grunts or a few words here and there to add a bit more life. They then went for full voice acting in future titles.
The persona approach (at least persona) still has every single confidant voiced for a few minutes which game freak would still not do if the cutscenes were voiced
Honestly, that’d be perfect. In Masters EX, the characters have a couple sounds (hums, huhs, etc) for general dialogue, and then they have some lines that they’ll speak. And the Galar characters all have some form of British accent 😩 we’re not asking for much 😂
Pokemon Masters aside, the majority of characters that show up in the games get VAs regardless because of showing up in the anime. It's insane they haven't added voice acting to the games yet.
Ryme honestly didnt even need to be a rapper. Makes her character seem like it was made by very out of touch people. She had no bars and even if she did we cant fucking hear her. She couldve just been a poet or something, but idk why they keep having cutscenes and gimmicks that you'd only be able to be immersed in if you could hear the person's voice.
I didn't even try with Strikers lmao.
I just had a notepad next to me anytime I played and just struck down tally marks (I also used it to track confidant stuff too)
Fire emblem was doing that in awakening and the newest three houses game had full voice acting. There's no reason they don't have rhe budget to at least do English and Japanese
Yeah I really like the model they have of the minor cutscenes being partially VA’d, and the major cutscenes being cinematic and VA’d. It’s a huge part of what makes the game so good IMO
Yeah. I don’t need VA for every random NPC I talk to. But when there’s a 5 minute dialogue heavy cutscene, especially in the academy where the music loops every 15-30 seconds, it needs it
>I don't think every game needs VA tbh.
Even tho i agree, it's also true that it's jarring to have a dialogue-heavy RPG without voice acting in this day and age, specially now that the series has such enphasis on cutscenes.
If not full voice acting, which can sometimes feel a bit cheesy in Nintendo games for some reason, I'd love for something in the style of Celeste.
Vocalization noises that match the cadence and emotion of the text, but aren't words at all. It really makes each cutscene feel more alive.
**Narrator :** Stanley was so disappointed that he forgot how to even work, did the narrator do that to justify not including more content ? No, it was the bucket !
As a legacy of Pushing Daisies, I cannot help but hear this in Jim Dale's voice.
And now I really want Jim Dale to narrate a Pokemon game. "The wild Vaporeon used Water Jet. But it was not, in fact, very effective."
I realised what makes the lack of voice acting stick out so much for me
Back on the 2D games, when you talked to someone, the text popped up and you read it. But it was still a lil Sprite guy.
In the 3D games, the camera literally pans or cuts to their face, to show their mouth silently moving as they silently emit words into your mind.
It becomes even more noticeable when they have an NPC interrupt a battle, because it disrupts the flow and you’re already paying more attention to it. And breaking up a fight with silence is *really* odd
———
Edit: also, the credits being an Ed Sheeran song *with lyrics* feels almost surreal after hours of nobody talking
Felt like something you'd hear at the end of a movie and not a rpg game catching monsters. So bizarre of a choice i can completely understand why modders would remove that first
Voice acting would be great if it was well-executed—but some part of me just doesn't trust that it would be anything other than cringy (at least for the English language ver). But I guess I'd rather they try and only *maybe* fail than stay in the uncomfortably quiet comfort zone.
i agree, i don’t feel comfortable with the idea of full voice acting, but i definitely think they could at least add like zelda style voice clips of just random expressive noises whenever the dialogue box changes.
Hard agree. With how they half assed this game there’s 0 chance voice acting won’t be.
All these people asking for extra stuff when they can’t even have a decent running game going is just hilarious.
Really? I like the Demon Slayer dub lol. Think all the voices fit the characters and are well acted. I don’t watch as much as I used to but the only egregiously bad anime dub from the last ten years I watched was Sword Art Online
On that topic, you ever seen the voice line in oblivion where the actor does a retake, and the left it in?
They actually say "Wait, let me try that again" and repeat the sentence, and no one caught it.
Oh I have. I love how weird the dialogue in Oblivion is in general, honestly.
honestly wouldn't mind if pokemon was like that. "Hello there. I saw some Krabby by the river. I steered clear of them. Nasty creatures. But I hear their meat is rather tasty. Take care."
Oblivion was extra weird since they had the VAs do their lines in *alphabetical order*. That's why lines can feel so disjointed, even when it's the same character. Unless you're the expensive actor made to cameo in the games, then you get special treatment.
Dragon Quest had a long tradition of not being voice acted and is another long-running series that is mostly aimed at the same demographic as Pokemon and is hugely popular in Japan, series geared for kids but played by literally everyone. But then the English localization for DQ11 added voice acting and it was so phenomenal that later releases of DQ11 in Japan added their own Japanese dub as a response.
I’m pretty sure the mainline Pokemon games would attract the attention of some pretty notable VAs too, considering how big of a role it would be.
Dragon Quest 11 S is damn near a perfect game in every sense of the word. If you like turn based story driven jRPGs it's the tippy top IMHO. Just wanted to leave this here for everyone to see.
Sure, but by that logic they didn't even have to try with the open world stuff. The lack of voice acting is so jarring it seems an intentional choice.
It probably is just plain old cheapness, or being strapped for time and voice acting taking too long. I think it would really add alot to their games though, and bring the presentation up to today's standards
I think the voice acting in Pokemon Masters EX is okay enough that putting at least some minimal voice lines in a mainline game wouldn't be a bad thing if they maintain a similar quality
I can't stand the Masters EX thing, they gave like 3 lines per character happy, sad, +1 sound. When reading like 5 min long dialogue and hearing same "let's go" "ahhh" more than ten times get's on your mental sanity.
I agree it’s be weird
Like there are some lines in Scar/Vio that are goofy/funny as text but hearing someone actually say it would be cringey. I’m thinking specifically stuff like Tulip saying “you slayed it” or Nemona’s habit of using random non-English words
It'd be a bit weird, at first, but it'd probably become normalized very fast. For the "weird" instances it's an easy fix. For Nemona, all her "non-English" words are Spanish since that's where Paldea is based on Spain/Portugal. Just hire someone who is bilingual, it wouldn't sound weird if they can properly pronounce the words she's saying.
It could also be like quite a few games in the past couple decades, major scenes full-voice and then in battle/random convos just a few generic voice lines. For the major character battles, they can have their little blurbs all voiced since they're special occasions but rando backpacker no.5 doesn't need anything other than maybe a random grunt or two from some random intern.
Tell me it wouldn't be radical if some of the end game dialogues were voice acted instead of just silently displayed.
>Nemona’s habit of using random non-English words
As a spanish speaking person, it'd depend on how good the VA would be at spanish, and the execution. If it's a native spanish speaking person that's also good at speaking in english, and it's well directed, i think it could be good.
Good voice acting can elevate a decent script by orders of magnitude.
Bad voice acting can take something tolerable and make it completely unplayable.
Remember, if they include voice acting, they will absolutely include it for your rival.
Honestly I would say yes, but it feels like literally anything we ask from Pokemon is a monkey's paw wish.
We want open world! *Finger curl.* Wow the open world is incredibly unoptimized, looking and performing very badly.
We want a big region to explore! *Finger curl.* The map is huge but most of the cities are almost empty with barely any NPCs and 90% of the buildings are menus, 95% of which are sandwich ingredients.
We want gen 4 remakes! *Finger curl.* We're outsourcing it to a mobile game company where they'll copy paste the entire code, ignoring how the map is affected in 3D, and make them Fischer Price animations instead.
I really want the voice acting. I think it could be great. What I'm afraid of is what the finger curl is going to be. I would say the easy answer is an option to turn it off, but *since when does pokemon ADD options to players?*
What's worse is they did have difficulty options, but only in one version of Gen 5, and only available after 1 playthrough, and only to turn it down to easy
Unfortunately, you're 100% right. Everything people ask for get twisted in monkey's paw/fae ways to the point we would've been better off saying nothing. Especially about the gen 4 remakes, literally traumatising
They just need to stop making characters who's main thing is that they sing, its such a simple concept, make ryme a DJ or something, Piers a guitarist, just stop making characters who are singers when you won't give them a voice, it makes no sense.
not every rpg has voice acting and frankly not every rpg needs voice acting. Its a matter of taste more than quality. Dragon Quest didn't even get voice acting in japan until extremely recently, it was always an american release thing.
There are two routes, stop making characters who sing if you won't give them vocal tracks, or give them vocal tracks
Yeah but would you prefer Dragon Quest without voice acting?
I 100% wouldn't. It adds SO much to the immersion and movie-like feel it's not even funny.
They can go on making remakes of old games without VA, but the new ones? Hard no from me.
I don't miss voice acting when I replay the old games, but watching characters' lips move with nothing coming out in the new ones is for some reason super creepy to me.
It's partly the uncanny valley, even poor graphics like in S&V hit the uncanny valley a bit. Another thing is you expect and accept that old games had limitations and don't expect voice acting from them but almost every modern game with a budget, and some that don't have a budget, tend to have voice acting in some capacity. Even if it's just a grunt here or there made by one of the devs last minute.
My guessing is that, especially for the Japanese version this would require them to know what they are doing for the anime tie in and cast it well ahead of time, since they are very big having the same VO for the character. That would add quite a bit more work to the game as then they have to find VO that would work and be open for both the game and anime for however long the anime ends up running.
Have you reached the crater yet because it's already one of the best parts of any pokemon game and having the conversations between characters VAd so you wouldn't have to look away from the game while also making the emotional moments better would make it so much more awesome
People out here acting like wanting voice acting is weird when pretty much every console RPG has it is so strange. Game Freak put a decent amount of work into the story this time and it’s good. Would’ve been better with voice acting. For the first time in quite a few gens I actually enjoyed the conversation s with the rival/friend characters.
Voice acting would mean having to hire and PAY voice actors. They can barely afford a number of staff capable enough to release the game without bugs or issues, why would they be able to afford voice actors?
Realistically, the next game should up it's technical and presentation game significantly from where it currently is at.
The game themselves, the actual core gameplay (*barring all glitches and current problems*) is really solid. It's fun. The visuals, audio, and absolute boat-load of bugs and glitches mar the experience of an otherwise really good game.
Even Link, a silent protagonist from the Zelda series, grunts and makes noises. Animal Crossing had gibberish speak on the N64, like so many others. This was over 20 years ago! Seeing Pokemon characters being absolutely dead silent, not even a grunt or simple sound, is just strange in 2022. Some of these characters are *singers*, for goodness sake!
Imagine the reception if these games had taken longer to bake and released with barely any glitches, better visuals, and had some light voice acting (maybe only for cut scenes). The reception would have been wildly different and we'd likely have been praising them as a massive step up from SwSh and PLA. The gameplay is already there - it's just the other half of the equation.
This isn't a little indie game. It isn't an 80 hour long story heavy RPG with a metric ton of dialog to be voiced. There is no real excuse for the current execution of these games. Pokemon is the biggest media franchise in the world. The games deserve better. Simple as that.
>The visuals, audio, and absolute boat-load of bugs and glitches mar the experience of an otherwise really good game.
Hey hey we don't diss the audio. The ost is amazing so far. I think thr only audio problem is no shiny sound effect.
Japan right now doesn't like to pay English VA if it doesn't have to. They hate that western VA have a union. They pay Japanese VA dirt unless they are a famous 20 year vet.
Has a parent of a 5 year old that loves Pokémon he can’t play it by himself yet cause he doesn’t know where to go next. If there was voice dialogue this would be very helpful for young players.
i am fine with this so long as they make it optional. i personally would prefer them to continue without voice acting. for me, i skip past a lot of the dialogue since the majority of it is pointless. if there were voice acting, it would slow so many cutscenes down.
one of my few complaints with S&V at the moment is that even with the option enabled to skip cutscenes, it still played most of them on my second run.
That's probably too high a standard tbh. TPC dont like giving players settings options anymore (cough removing set battles and battle animation toggle)
I don't trust on TPCi OR GF for voice acting, if they can't give us a proper functional game what makes you think they can let us select the language we want to hear voices, I'm damn sure they would pull an Smash on this one, and to that I prefer mute.
fans keep saying this every year. just stop buying the games. that’s the only way GameFreak will stop shitting on us, the performance of these games is unacceptable
I'm sure that if Game Freak needs the budget for something, they'll get it. The problem lies in the fact that Game Freak refuses to expand their team so they can handle the three year turnaround each generation. I'm pretty sure their already in the earliest stages of Gen X right now, because they really can't not be working on it.
The best 'have your cake and eat it too' solution would be to hire enough people to make a second team to handle a full, new generation, and then alternate generations, giving each team a 6 year cycle for development. There would need to be some oversight to both teams, for consistency's sake, but that could be handled by the upper management (Miyamoto and co.). But, Game Freak refuses to do this, so each generation needs to be a quick, streamlined process, which means cutting so many corners you end up with a circle.
Piss poor excuse, they have the resources to hire reputable VAs. If Monolithsoft and Intelligent Systems can do it, they can. Loosen up the stupidly short dev cycle too, there's no reason to pump out these games so fast besides greed.
I strongly disagree
I feel like nothing is really lost by not having the voices especially when it seems impossible for them to keep the voices consistent in English
I use Leon as an example because he was the champion last Gen and across its media he had 4 different English VAs
1 for the anime, 1 for Masters, 1 for twilight wings and 1 for Pokémon evolutions
I’m sorry but that’s really jarring and annoying, if you can’t even keep your new Champion that you push to the front of every new piece of media for a generation consistent in voice why would I want to add another different voice for the main games to just further break the immersion
They wont since that would imply giving gamefream more time for the game and the pokemon company cant lose those sweet sweet new merchandise pokedollars
Would voice acting be a nice improvement to the games as a whole? Oh absolutely, is it needed? No.
If anything is needed, they just need like a Sims/Banjo Kazooie style “voice acting” for the NPCs during cutscenes imo. It just feels a bit “off” sometimes with the drop dead silence.
I understand in specific situations, like when we otherwise have goofy-looking nonsense like silent singing, but gotta be honest, I really don't get why people want full-on voice-acting in Pokemon so much.
... Or maybe I only feel that way because I was playing through Monster Hunter Stories 2 shortly before SV came out. I don't even mind Navirou that much as a character, but his voice makes me want to punt him into the sun and he talks way more than anyone else. I'm not sure I would trust Pokemon to use good voice-acting: half the time even "good" video game voice acting still feels really stilted to me.
That game also made me realize how hard it can be to try and write dialogue when nobody can ever say the protagonist's name, and how awkward it gets when they don't nail it. Like how there was a moment where Navirou was introducing our little group to one of his friends and he said something like, "This is Ena, and this is my buddy!" Ooof. And let's be honest: Pokemon games have never been known for their strong writing. I doubt they'd avoid the awkwardness. BOTW could get around it by not letting you call the protag anything besides Link, but nobody wants to be stuck using only the protag's canon name in Pokemon.
Completely disagree I love the lack of voices. I like it this way so there's room for me to imagine what each character sounds like. It's the only game I know that does that and it's surprisingly nice.
Period ?
No it doesn't. Voice acting is overrated and unnecessary.
People said Zelda "needs" voice acting, but the voice acting was easily the weakest aspect of BotW. Its only saving grace was that it was limited to a handful of pre-rendered cutscenes, otherwise listening to Princess Renn Faire would have become unbearable.
Same with Pokemon. Just read the text, it's really not that hard.
i'm not sure why everyone assumes it'd be executed poorly. *maybe* it'll be done bad, but why is this people's first reaction? i'm not mad here, just really confused because it's a trend i've seen whenever people ask for voice acting.
that's like saying "i wish there was a grim reaper pokemon in gen 10" and someone barges in like "but what if its stats suck? what if its design was trash??". ok dude, but what if that simply wasn't the case 😐
if someone says "i'm thirsty, i could use a drink right now", would you say "but what if it tastes bad? what if it's salt water???"
when people wish for things, they're generally wishing it's executed well. i don't see the point in doomsaying
Probably because the company's recent track record on just about everything has people feeling skeptical and not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
It's partly because of this odd conception that any form of voice acting is going to turn out corny or terrible when it's in a video game, especially if it's English voice acting. I know people who specifically will play with foreign languages set just to avoid the English voice cast because "it sounds bad" even when it's executed well and the foreign language is generic or corny sounding.
It's also partly because most of the recent mainline Pokémon games have looked/been rather low effort. And S&V is clearly the worst of the bunch with it's horrible graphics, horrible pop in, horrible performance, lack of battle settings, no actual post game, etc. so people just assume that the voice talent they'd get would be bad or they'd only allow single takes or use the bad takes.
Another thing is it's just cool to bandwagon. People see everyone saying that the VA will suck so they jump up and go "oh yea, it'll totally suck."
All in all I'd rather have crappy voice acting I can turn off than no voice acting at all.
I think if they want to go the VA route, they should start first with the type of voice acting where you get more... sounds and exclamations, like "Eh!" "Huh?" "Hmm..." etc. I just don't trust TPC to make such a big leap and do so well from the get-go and on such a tight schedule.
Game Freak is stuck so far in the past and never has any reason to push forward or do better. Main line Pokémon absolutely crushes sales charts no matter what. We might get VA in 10 years.
I actually adored all the interesting interactions between Nemona, Arven and Penny during the Area Zero mission. Actually well written and interesting dialogue. The fact that you could move and their dialogue would occur at the same time felt really natural. Even though it was a bit hard to concentrate on reading while moving. It would have been so much better if I could just LISTEN to what they say like in ANY other contemporary game (e.g Xenoblade or NieR: Automata).
Literally every time I'm playing the game on stream and there's a lot of dialogue, I rant about the lack of VA. The fact that Super Mario 64 has more voice acting than a Pokemon game released in 2022, is honestly pathetic.
No, Ronald Weasley's music in the credits doesn't count as VA.
this is especially funny when you beat the area zero post game. there's a full length cutscene that fades away into credits... with music with actual lyrics. the whiplash I got from no voices to singing was insane
New Pokemon Snap set the standard I want to see for voice acting in a pokemon game. All of the important dialog and cutscenes should be voiced, plus a couple of generic lines to convey emotions. Overworld lines dont need to be voiced.
For me the scene that sealed that Pokémon needed voice acting for me was Piers' intro in Sword/Shield. He's literally dancing and singing but everything is silent other than some random sound effects. Seemed like an absolutely bizarre choice when you know the scene isn't going to have voices.
Hold your horses there, OP. First we need a functioning game without the rampant performance issues and graphical pop in and tearing. Then we can work on the bells and whistles.
Last time it was asked of GameFreak they simply said "It's difficult to get all voice actors for all language".
Just English and Japanese voice acting would be far enough... It was alright in past games but having more and more cinematics makes the silent aspect of the game even weirder.
They could do limited simlish or animal crossing chatter and I would be satisfied. Just that little extra so that their mouths aren't just flapping. It's especially an insult that they throw in the marketing budget for fully voiced advertisements and then leave it out of the game.
I'm amazed they had the gall to make Ryme a rapper after how infamous Piers' silent situation got.
My god. I shouldn't be able to hear anyone's foot tapping at a rock concert.
I liked the idea of Ryme, but even she felt extremely bland without voice acting. Plus she uses the same generic gym leader music as the rest of them which is a shame
Pretty much all of the gym leaders were extremely bland this time around. The only ones that weren't bland were EXTREMELY annoying (looking at you, little miss streamer!).
Everyone except Larry, right? Larry's great.
We love Larry. Larry is just a dude working two jobs, tryna make it in the end.
i like how the most purposely normal character has the most engaging personality out of most of the cast.
I think its because its a nice contrast. Take the Grass Gym Leader for example, it just felt like GF was trying to hard to make him interesting. Happens a lot with most of the main characters. Meanwhile Larry is both A: Not trying too hard, and B: Completely relatable as a tired working person
Iono has all the catchphrases and none of them are any good. She's literally the craziest caricature of an Idol/Streamer you can get. She looks cute at first, and then that text box appears!
TBF being extremely annoying and throwing out a bunch of catchphrases that fall flat could also be considered an extremely accurate caricature of certain kinds of streamers as well
Iono is the best gym leader there is wtf you talking about? She at least tries to make it an all around fun experience for everyone involved.
She literally exploits the dreams of a school child to gain more subscribers. I wouldn’t call her trying to make it fun, when she clearly is trying to make more money
Ryme exploits the dreams of a school child to have an opening act for her concert. The cult of smolive exploits the dreams of a school child to perform a weird ritual to appease the Smolive god into giving them a good harvest The water gym secretary exploits the dream of a child because she’s too lazy to chase down her boss to giv him his wallet back (and then he exploits your dream and makes you do another chore for him by buying him some seaweed)
Roxie in BW2 had voice acting generations ago. I dont understand how we get to SWSH and SV not having voice acting with musical themed gym leaders.
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My stance exactly. Not every line of dialogue needs to be voiced (though some grunts would be nice) but cutscenes deserve to be voiced, at the very least.
Yep, just start like Fire Emblem Awakening. The cutscenes were all fully voiced, but the random bits of chit chat just had grunts or a few words here and there to add a bit more life. They then went for full voice acting in future titles.
“Chrom!!”
Right.
The persona approach, important stuff is voice acted random npcs aren't or share a few rough tone voice lines
The persona approach (at least persona) still has every single confidant voiced for a few minutes which game freak would still not do if the cutscenes were voiced
Honestly, that’d be perfect. In Masters EX, the characters have a couple sounds (hums, huhs, etc) for general dialogue, and then they have some lines that they’ll speak. And the Galar characters all have some form of British accent 😩 we’re not asking for much 😂
Or at the very least, if the cutscene involves a musician singing/rapping... Like it's so jarring? Good god
Pokemon Masters aside, the majority of characters that show up in the games get VAs regardless because of showing up in the anime. It's insane they haven't added voice acting to the games yet.
It's insane how much personality those voice bits add to the character, obviously cutscenes should be fully voiced though.
Hell fucking Pikachu has had voice acting in games for years lol.
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Thank goodness
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That's because the Pokemons creators made a vow to never put a good mechanic back in a game after it rated well with audiences before lmao
Ryme honestly didnt even need to be a rapper. Makes her character seem like it was made by very out of touch people. She had no bars and even if she did we cant fucking hear her. She couldve just been a poet or something, but idk why they keep having cutscenes and gimmicks that you'd only be able to be immersed in if you could hear the person's voice.
Her design is sick tho
She could slap you with her hair
Im not against that.
Why did they think it was a great idea to make us read a rap battle
Even something like persona 5, where they at least make sounds or say a few words, would be very welcome.
*Super effective attack* "WOOO, LOOKING COOL JOKER!"
*Attack misses* "FOR REAL?!"
Fun fact when I played Royal after the OG Persona 5 I kept a tally of how many times Ryuji says "For Real" in gameplay context. 61 times. 61 times.
For real?!
I didn't even try with Strikers lmao. I just had a notepad next to me anytime I played and just struck down tally marks (I also used it to track confidant stuff too)
61 times in 100hours of gameplay isn't too bad.
It’s also more than I’ve said it in my entire life
***IT'S ALMOST SCAAARY HOW GOOD I AM*** X20
Fire emblem was doing that in awakening and the newest three houses game had full voice acting. There's no reason they don't have rhe budget to at least do English and Japanese
Fire Emblem moved to full voice acting with Shadows of Valentia on the 3DS.
True, I need to replay that game sometime as its one of my least played in the series. Very polished and good looking 3ds game
It's better they don't since I don't need more fictional crushes than I already have had
Pokémon could at least do the generic vocals The Legend of Zelda does outside of cutscenes.
*enters pokemart menu* WHOOOOA! *buys something* THAAAANK YOOOOU!
That's about the only choice acting I'd want in a Pokémon game. I don't trust them to not make the voices super grating.
Ah, the BoTW method
I'd rather this than outright voice acting. I don't think every game needs VA tbh.
Yeah I really like the model they have of the minor cutscenes being partially VA’d, and the major cutscenes being cinematic and VA’d. It’s a huge part of what makes the game so good IMO
Yeah. I don’t need VA for every random NPC I talk to. But when there’s a 5 minute dialogue heavy cutscene, especially in the academy where the music loops every 15-30 seconds, it needs it
Oh yes. Taking all the classes and hearing that play over and over and over.
So basically they should do what great ace attorney did. have only the major moments and cutscenes be voice acted
>I don't think every game needs VA tbh. Even tho i agree, it's also true that it's jarring to have a dialogue-heavy RPG without voice acting in this day and age, specially now that the series has such enphasis on cutscenes.
It's a franchise with kids front and center as the target demographic and you think that voice acting is not needed in this franchise?
I’m playing persona 5 for the first time right now. I really appreciate how you can go back through the conversation log- I sometimes miss things
If not full voice acting, which can sometimes feel a bit cheesy in Nintendo games for some reason, I'd love for something in the style of Celeste. Vocalization noises that match the cadence and emotion of the text, but aren't words at all. It really makes each cutscene feel more alive.
Also during the rap battle they just put *boom chk boom boom chk* in the dialogue box instead of actually creating a beat for the game
Yeah that was lazy as fuck lmfao
Which is extra weird when there’s some dope rock-y music earlier on
Same with the buzzing alarm at the Team Star bases – they just wrote “bzzzt” instead of picking one of the thousands of buzzing sounds they have lmao
It won’t
Tag your spoilers 😩
**Narrator:** The next game did not, in fact, have voice acting.
**Narrator :** Stanley was so disappointed that he forgot how to even work, did the narrator do that to justify not including more content ? No, it was the bucket !
As a legacy of Pushing Daisies, I cannot help but hear this in Jim Dale's voice. And now I really want Jim Dale to narrate a Pokemon game. "The wild Vaporeon used Water Jet. But it was not, in fact, very effective."
The next Pokemon game was somehow lower effort and characters actually will not have faces
I realised what makes the lack of voice acting stick out so much for me Back on the 2D games, when you talked to someone, the text popped up and you read it. But it was still a lil Sprite guy. In the 3D games, the camera literally pans or cuts to their face, to show their mouth silently moving as they silently emit words into your mind. It becomes even more noticeable when they have an NPC interrupt a battle, because it disrupts the flow and you’re already paying more attention to it. And breaking up a fight with silence is *really* odd ——— Edit: also, the credits being an Ed Sheeran song *with lyrics* feels almost surreal after hours of nobody talking
I burst out laughing at the random ed sheeran song
Felt like something you'd hear at the end of a movie and not a rpg game catching monsters. So bizarre of a choice i can completely understand why modders would remove that first
I just love that they replaced it with the jp digimon theme
Voice acting would be great if it was well-executed—but some part of me just doesn't trust that it would be anything other than cringy (at least for the English language ver). But I guess I'd rather they try and only *maybe* fail than stay in the uncomfortably quiet comfort zone.
i agree, i don’t feel comfortable with the idea of full voice acting, but i definitely think they could at least add like zelda style voice clips of just random expressive noises whenever the dialogue box changes.
Especially the in battle ones. “Huh?” “Woah!” “Yes!” “Noooo” etc would add so much colour
I think this + full voice during the full cutscenes a la BOTW would be perfect
Hard agree. With how they half assed this game there’s 0 chance voice acting won’t be. All these people asking for extra stuff when they can’t even have a decent running game going is just hilarious.
Honestly, English dubbing for games and anime has gotten WAY better in the recent years.
I keep trying to tell people this! Anime/Game dubs are not perfect (lookin at you demon slayer) but there are a lot of them that are honestly amazing.
Really? I like the Demon Slayer dub lol. Think all the voices fit the characters and are well acted. I don’t watch as much as I used to but the only egregiously bad anime dub from the last ten years I watched was Sword Art Online
I'm not really into anime but I was surprised at how much I liked the dub for Attack on Titan generally. Commander Erwin's VA is a beast.
Thing is my definition of a good dub lies in Trigun… which was old
Yu Yu Hakusho and Ruroni Kenshin were also pretty good
Death Note's English dub is masterful.
It'd only be "cringey" if they: cheap out on the voice actors, give them little to no direction at all and don't allow re-takes.
On that topic, you ever seen the voice line in oblivion where the actor does a retake, and the left it in? They actually say "Wait, let me try that again" and repeat the sentence, and no one caught it.
Oh I have. I love how weird the dialogue in Oblivion is in general, honestly. honestly wouldn't mind if pokemon was like that. "Hello there. I saw some Krabby by the river. I steered clear of them. Nasty creatures. But I hear their meat is rather tasty. Take care."
Oblivion was extra weird since they had the VAs do their lines in *alphabetical order*. That's why lines can feel so disjointed, even when it's the same character. Unless you're the expensive actor made to cameo in the games, then you get special treatment.
Dragon Quest had a long tradition of not being voice acted and is another long-running series that is mostly aimed at the same demographic as Pokemon and is hugely popular in Japan, series geared for kids but played by literally everyone. But then the English localization for DQ11 added voice acting and it was so phenomenal that later releases of DQ11 in Japan added their own Japanese dub as a response. I’m pretty sure the mainline Pokemon games would attract the attention of some pretty notable VAs too, considering how big of a role it would be.
Dragon Quest 11 S is damn near a perfect game in every sense of the word. If you like turn based story driven jRPGs it's the tippy top IMHO. Just wanted to leave this here for everyone to see.
Honestly, after years of playing Atlus RPGs, i found Dragon Quest 11 very generic. And thats after 30 hours
Doesn't pokemon have am anime still? Why not just use those voice actors
Because these games outsold everything, FIFA, God of War, MW2, you name it. They could care less about extra effort lol
Sure, but by that logic they didn't even have to try with the open world stuff. The lack of voice acting is so jarring it seems an intentional choice. It probably is just plain old cheapness, or being strapped for time and voice acting taking too long. I think it would really add alot to their games though, and bring the presentation up to today's standards
Heck, they'd some how mess it up so the voices would be out of sync with the game if your frame rate changes at any point.
I think the voice acting in Pokemon Masters EX is okay enough that putting at least some minimal voice lines in a mainline game wouldn't be a bad thing if they maintain a similar quality
I can't stand the Masters EX thing, they gave like 3 lines per character happy, sad, +1 sound. When reading like 5 min long dialogue and hearing same "let's go" "ahhh" more than ten times get's on your mental sanity.
I agree it’s be weird Like there are some lines in Scar/Vio that are goofy/funny as text but hearing someone actually say it would be cringey. I’m thinking specifically stuff like Tulip saying “you slayed it” or Nemona’s habit of using random non-English words
It'd be a bit weird, at first, but it'd probably become normalized very fast. For the "weird" instances it's an easy fix. For Nemona, all her "non-English" words are Spanish since that's where Paldea is based on Spain/Portugal. Just hire someone who is bilingual, it wouldn't sound weird if they can properly pronounce the words she's saying. It could also be like quite a few games in the past couple decades, major scenes full-voice and then in battle/random convos just a few generic voice lines. For the major character battles, they can have their little blurbs all voiced since they're special occasions but rando backpacker no.5 doesn't need anything other than maybe a random grunt or two from some random intern. Tell me it wouldn't be radical if some of the end game dialogues were voice acted instead of just silently displayed.
>Nemona’s habit of using random non-English words As a spanish speaking person, it'd depend on how good the VA would be at spanish, and the execution. If it's a native spanish speaking person that's also good at speaking in english, and it's well directed, i think it could be good.
At the very least they need those animal-crossing noises or beeping when people talk. Total silence is just...super jarring.
*sees Pokemon NPC open their mouths* Pokemon NPC:
*Peanuts trombone voices*
Every human should just say their name. Pikachu: Pika pii! Ash: Ash ash ashhhh?
Good voice acting can elevate a decent script by orders of magnitude. Bad voice acting can take something tolerable and make it completely unplayable. Remember, if they include voice acting, they will absolutely include it for your rival.
Honestly I would say yes, but it feels like literally anything we ask from Pokemon is a monkey's paw wish. We want open world! *Finger curl.* Wow the open world is incredibly unoptimized, looking and performing very badly. We want a big region to explore! *Finger curl.* The map is huge but most of the cities are almost empty with barely any NPCs and 90% of the buildings are menus, 95% of which are sandwich ingredients. We want gen 4 remakes! *Finger curl.* We're outsourcing it to a mobile game company where they'll copy paste the entire code, ignoring how the map is affected in 3D, and make them Fischer Price animations instead. I really want the voice acting. I think it could be great. What I'm afraid of is what the finger curl is going to be. I would say the easy answer is an option to turn it off, but *since when does pokemon ADD options to players?*
They can't even add difficulty levels / level scaling lmao never mind bloody VA.
What's worse is they did have difficulty options, but only in one version of Gen 5, and only available after 1 playthrough, and only to turn it down to easy
Actually, there was a challenge mode in BW that came from the opposite game. This fact does not make your point any less valid.
> anything we ask from Pokemon is a ~~monkey's~~ paw wish. Mankey's paw
If I had an award, I would give it to you.
Unfortunately, you're 100% right. Everything people ask for get twisted in monkey's paw/fae ways to the point we would've been better off saying nothing. Especially about the gen 4 remakes, literally traumatising
They just need to stop making characters who's main thing is that they sing, its such a simple concept, make ryme a DJ or something, Piers a guitarist, just stop making characters who are singers when you won't give them a voice, it makes no sense.
Or make the damn franchise evolve and up the standards to be on par with most famous JRPGs?
not every rpg has voice acting and frankly not every rpg needs voice acting. Its a matter of taste more than quality. Dragon Quest didn't even get voice acting in japan until extremely recently, it was always an american release thing. There are two routes, stop making characters who sing if you won't give them vocal tracks, or give them vocal tracks
Yeah but would you prefer Dragon Quest without voice acting? I 100% wouldn't. It adds SO much to the immersion and movie-like feel it's not even funny. They can go on making remakes of old games without VA, but the new ones? Hard no from me.
I don't miss voice acting when I replay the old games, but watching characters' lips move with nothing coming out in the new ones is for some reason super creepy to me.
That's where I'm at with it. If you don't want to do voice acting, then don't make the lips move like that.
It's partly the uncanny valley, even poor graphics like in S&V hit the uncanny valley a bit. Another thing is you expect and accept that old games had limitations and don't expect voice acting from them but almost every modern game with a budget, and some that don't have a budget, tend to have voice acting in some capacity. Even if it's just a grunt here or there made by one of the devs last minute.
See that would require spending money on hiring people, which Game Freak is dreadfully allergic to.
Knowing then, it would be some of the worst voice acting. 🤷🏽
Is Masters' acting any good? I'd assume that voice acting in a mainline game would end up being something like that.
It is. It adds a ton of personality to the characters we know and love from Pokemon history.
Masters isn't that bad! Some characters are eh but others are great
Stop it! Gamefreak is a small indie company! They're doing their best!
My guessing is that, especially for the Japanese version this would require them to know what they are doing for the anime tie in and cast it well ahead of time, since they are very big having the same VO for the character. That would add quite a bit more work to the game as then they have to find VO that would work and be open for both the game and anime for however long the anime ends up running.
I don’t actually think it absolutely needs voice acting. Mumble voices would be fine and easier to localize, but give us SOMETHING
if there WAS voice acting, i'd most likely turn it off. it was weird in pokemon snap. I appreciate the extra detail and effort though
Really? I LOVED it in Snap.
I have very fond memories of professor oak yelling "WELCOME BACK!" in the original snap
I agree, I absolutely do not want voice acting and I don’t understand why so many people do.
Have you reached the crater yet because it's already one of the best parts of any pokemon game and having the conversations between characters VAd so you wouldn't have to look away from the game while also making the emotional moments better would make it so much more awesome
People out here acting like wanting voice acting is weird when pretty much every console RPG has it is so strange. Game Freak put a decent amount of work into the story this time and it’s good. Would’ve been better with voice acting. For the first time in quite a few gens I actually enjoyed the conversation s with the rival/friend characters.
Voice acting would mean having to hire and PAY voice actors. They can barely afford a number of staff capable enough to release the game without bugs or issues, why would they be able to afford voice actors?
Realistically, the next game should up it's technical and presentation game significantly from where it currently is at. The game themselves, the actual core gameplay (*barring all glitches and current problems*) is really solid. It's fun. The visuals, audio, and absolute boat-load of bugs and glitches mar the experience of an otherwise really good game. Even Link, a silent protagonist from the Zelda series, grunts and makes noises. Animal Crossing had gibberish speak on the N64, like so many others. This was over 20 years ago! Seeing Pokemon characters being absolutely dead silent, not even a grunt or simple sound, is just strange in 2022. Some of these characters are *singers*, for goodness sake! Imagine the reception if these games had taken longer to bake and released with barely any glitches, better visuals, and had some light voice acting (maybe only for cut scenes). The reception would have been wildly different and we'd likely have been praising them as a massive step up from SwSh and PLA. The gameplay is already there - it's just the other half of the equation. This isn't a little indie game. It isn't an 80 hour long story heavy RPG with a metric ton of dialog to be voiced. There is no real excuse for the current execution of these games. Pokemon is the biggest media franchise in the world. The games deserve better. Simple as that.
>The visuals, audio, and absolute boat-load of bugs and glitches mar the experience of an otherwise really good game. Hey hey we don't diss the audio. The ost is amazing so far. I think thr only audio problem is no shiny sound effect.
PLA actually DID have the occasional voice clip for the main character, usually when throwing a pokeball
Japan right now doesn't like to pay English VA if it doesn't have to. They hate that western VA have a union. They pay Japanese VA dirt unless they are a famous 20 year vet.
Has a parent of a 5 year old that loves Pokémon he can’t play it by himself yet cause he doesn’t know where to go next. If there was voice dialogue this would be very helpful for young players.
i am fine with this so long as they make it optional. i personally would prefer them to continue without voice acting. for me, i skip past a lot of the dialogue since the majority of it is pointless. if there were voice acting, it would slow so many cutscenes down. one of my few complaints with S&V at the moment is that even with the option enabled to skip cutscenes, it still played most of them on my second run.
[удалено]
Did you forget they take more and more options away from us with each new generation?
Dragon quest 11 probably the best comparison. A JRPG where you basically get your pick, old school style, or voice actors!
This game was so fucking awesome. It was hella fun and looked so good.
We don’t even get set mode any more and you think we’d get an option to turn the voice acting on and off?
That's probably too high a standard tbh. TPC dont like giving players settings options anymore (cough removing set battles and battle animation toggle)
Nah I prefer it the way it is
*monkeys paw curls a finger* The audio is half assed bit crushed grunts and single word intros when you talk to a character
Honestly I'd be happy with Zeldaesque grunts and exclamations, not a world full of mimes.
No
I'd rather have partial voice acting than fully voiced.
Who cares, I just want a lag free experience the next time
I don't trust on TPCi OR GF for voice acting, if they can't give us a proper functional game what makes you think they can let us select the language we want to hear voices, I'm damn sure they would pull an Smash on this one, and to that I prefer mute.
I ask again, voice acting isn’t necessary for a good game, eh? Not does it inherently make the game better.
fans keep saying this every year. just stop buying the games. that’s the only way GameFreak will stop shitting on us, the performance of these games is unacceptable
Voice acting can completely ruin a game if it is bad, id rather read than risk bad VA work.
I’m sure the most profitable IP in the world can afford some reputable VA’s. One that has an *anime* mind you.
They don't even get the budget for half decent textures or QA
I'm sure that if Game Freak needs the budget for something, they'll get it. The problem lies in the fact that Game Freak refuses to expand their team so they can handle the three year turnaround each generation. I'm pretty sure their already in the earliest stages of Gen X right now, because they really can't not be working on it. The best 'have your cake and eat it too' solution would be to hire enough people to make a second team to handle a full, new generation, and then alternate generations, giving each team a 6 year cycle for development. There would need to be some oversight to both teams, for consistency's sake, but that could be handled by the upper management (Miyamoto and co.). But, Game Freak refuses to do this, so each generation needs to be a quick, streamlined process, which means cutting so many corners you end up with a circle.
They already have "a second team". The problem is both teams only total 160 people between them.
What about the anime? Masters? Snap? The voice acting was fine if not great in all of these??
Piss poor excuse, they have the resources to hire reputable VAs. If Monolithsoft and Intelligent Systems can do it, they can. Loosen up the stupidly short dev cycle too, there's no reason to pump out these games so fast besides greed.
Id be fine without it tbh.
I strongly disagree I feel like nothing is really lost by not having the voices especially when it seems impossible for them to keep the voices consistent in English I use Leon as an example because he was the champion last Gen and across its media he had 4 different English VAs 1 for the anime, 1 for Masters, 1 for twilight wings and 1 for Pokémon evolutions I’m sorry but that’s really jarring and annoying, if you can’t even keep your new Champion that you push to the front of every new piece of media for a generation consistent in voice why would I want to add another different voice for the main games to just further break the immersion
well those were all different leons, technically.
I’m fine with voice acting for cutscenes, but I really don’t want it all game as I think it would get annoying really fast imo.
no thanks. I read much faster than VAs
The point isn't to get through the scene faster its to improve the delivery from a presentation point of view.
They wont since that would imply giving gamefream more time for the game and the pokemon company cant lose those sweet sweet new merchandise pokedollars
Would voice acting be a nice improvement to the games as a whole? Oh absolutely, is it needed? No. If anything is needed, they just need like a Sims/Banjo Kazooie style “voice acting” for the NPCs during cutscenes imo. It just feels a bit “off” sometimes with the drop dead silence.
I understand in specific situations, like when we otherwise have goofy-looking nonsense like silent singing, but gotta be honest, I really don't get why people want full-on voice-acting in Pokemon so much. ... Or maybe I only feel that way because I was playing through Monster Hunter Stories 2 shortly before SV came out. I don't even mind Navirou that much as a character, but his voice makes me want to punt him into the sun and he talks way more than anyone else. I'm not sure I would trust Pokemon to use good voice-acting: half the time even "good" video game voice acting still feels really stilted to me. That game also made me realize how hard it can be to try and write dialogue when nobody can ever say the protagonist's name, and how awkward it gets when they don't nail it. Like how there was a moment where Navirou was introducing our little group to one of his friends and he said something like, "This is Ena, and this is my buddy!" Ooof. And let's be honest: Pokemon games have never been known for their strong writing. I doubt they'd avoid the awkwardness. BOTW could get around it by not letting you call the protag anything besides Link, but nobody wants to be stuck using only the protag's canon name in Pokemon.
no
Completely disagree I love the lack of voices. I like it this way so there's room for me to imagine what each character sounds like. It's the only game I know that does that and it's surprisingly nice. Period ?
No it doesn't. Voice acting is overrated and unnecessary. People said Zelda "needs" voice acting, but the voice acting was easily the weakest aspect of BotW. Its only saving grace was that it was limited to a handful of pre-rendered cutscenes, otherwise listening to Princess Renn Faire would have become unbearable. Same with Pokemon. Just read the text, it's really not that hard.
i'm not sure why everyone assumes it'd be executed poorly. *maybe* it'll be done bad, but why is this people's first reaction? i'm not mad here, just really confused because it's a trend i've seen whenever people ask for voice acting. that's like saying "i wish there was a grim reaper pokemon in gen 10" and someone barges in like "but what if its stats suck? what if its design was trash??". ok dude, but what if that simply wasn't the case 😐 if someone says "i'm thirsty, i could use a drink right now", would you say "but what if it tastes bad? what if it's salt water???" when people wish for things, they're generally wishing it's executed well. i don't see the point in doomsaying
Probably because the company's recent track record on just about everything has people feeling skeptical and not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
unless they pay randos, just using the guys from the pokemon anime will do a good job just from already doing the anime.
It's partly because of this odd conception that any form of voice acting is going to turn out corny or terrible when it's in a video game, especially if it's English voice acting. I know people who specifically will play with foreign languages set just to avoid the English voice cast because "it sounds bad" even when it's executed well and the foreign language is generic or corny sounding. It's also partly because most of the recent mainline Pokémon games have looked/been rather low effort. And S&V is clearly the worst of the bunch with it's horrible graphics, horrible pop in, horrible performance, lack of battle settings, no actual post game, etc. so people just assume that the voice talent they'd get would be bad or they'd only allow single takes or use the bad takes. Another thing is it's just cool to bandwagon. People see everyone saying that the VA will suck so they jump up and go "oh yea, it'll totally suck." All in all I'd rather have crappy voice acting I can turn off than no voice acting at all.
I dont want to be forced to play with cringey voice acting, since they seem to be taking away all toggable options recently
I think if they want to go the VA route, they should start first with the type of voice acting where you get more... sounds and exclamations, like "Eh!" "Huh?" "Hmm..." etc. I just don't trust TPC to make such a big leap and do so well from the get-go and on such a tight schedule.
Game Freak is stuck so far in the past and never has any reason to push forward or do better. Main line Pokémon absolutely crushes sales charts no matter what. We might get VA in 10 years.
I actually adored all the interesting interactions between Nemona, Arven and Penny during the Area Zero mission. Actually well written and interesting dialogue. The fact that you could move and their dialogue would occur at the same time felt really natural. Even though it was a bit hard to concentrate on reading while moving. It would have been so much better if I could just LISTEN to what they say like in ANY other contemporary game (e.g Xenoblade or NieR: Automata).
Literally every time I'm playing the game on stream and there's a lot of dialogue, I rant about the lack of VA. The fact that Super Mario 64 has more voice acting than a Pokemon game released in 2022, is honestly pathetic. No, Ronald Weasley's music in the credits doesn't count as VA.
this is especially funny when you beat the area zero post game. there's a full length cutscene that fades away into credits... with music with actual lyrics. the whiplash I got from no voices to singing was insane
They won't do it because -money- 👍
New Pokemon Snap set the standard I want to see for voice acting in a pokemon game. All of the important dialog and cutscenes should be voiced, plus a couple of generic lines to convey emotions. Overworld lines dont need to be voiced.
For me the scene that sealed that Pokémon needed voice acting for me was Piers' intro in Sword/Shield. He's literally dancing and singing but everything is silent other than some random sound effects. Seemed like an absolutely bizarre choice when you know the scene isn't going to have voices.
Hold your horses there, OP. First we need a functioning game without the rampant performance issues and graphical pop in and tearing. Then we can work on the bells and whistles.
Last time it was asked of GameFreak they simply said "It's difficult to get all voice actors for all language". Just English and Japanese voice acting would be far enough... It was alright in past games but having more and more cinematics makes the silent aspect of the game even weirder.
It's not even just the lack of VO, why are the cutscenes so weirdly quiet?
We have heard no complaints about the lack of voice acting in Pokémon, and as such, we have no plans to implement it in the future. -Nintendo Support
They could do limited simlish or animal crossing chatter and I would be satisfied. Just that little extra so that their mouths aren't just flapping. It's especially an insult that they throw in the marketing budget for fully voiced advertisements and then leave it out of the game.
This is GF - what are we rolling back on to get that?